Campus, world braces for millennium-bug attack

Published: Monday, August 31, 1998

Monday, August 31, 1998

COMPUTERS: UCLA will spend $1.8 million to fix problems related to Y2K

By John Rethans

Daily Bruin Contributor

Across the globe, computer specialists are racing against time to avoid the potential disaster brought on by the computer glitch dubbed "Y2K."

The bug could scramble computer systems, tossing technology-dependent UCLA into chaos. Will your financial aid vaporize? Will your e-mail crash? Will equipment at the Medical Center just quit?

While possible, none of these scenarios, according to UCLA officials, seem likely.

Scattered in small groups and different departments throughout campus, dedicated information system specialists are diligently digging through millions of lines of program code, trying to right the wrongs of previous programmers. They only have 71 more weeks to do it.

"This is the first project I've been involved in where the deadline was non-negotiable," said Bonnie Allen, director of Administrative Information Systems (AIS).

The millennium bug stems from a simple mathematical anomaly. When the the year 2000 hits, internal program dates will read "00" instead of "2000," wreaking havoc on the computers internal logic and resulting in calculation errors.

"People get lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that this won't effect them," she said.

"Everything - servers, PCs, applications and software - are all susceptible to the bug. A computer bought last week could be faulty," Allen said.

This prognosis has led to a "multi-leveled, interdepartmental approach to this issue," according to Associate Vice Chancellor Allen Solomon, who is currently overseeing campus-wide Y2K efforts.

Several groups are hurrying to beat the deadline. The Office of Academic Computing (OAC), AIS, Communications Technology Services and the chief information officers from all the major campus departments have formed the Y2K Clearinghouse to share information.

In addition, Allen and her team of six at AIS are analyzing the programming code in its entire system. Once all the code has been fixed, Allen and Motz will run the entire system through a simulated time machine, which will push the computers internal clock forward to Jan. 1, 2000.

With this measure, AIS will be able to test its success ahead of time.

"(UCLA has) committed slightly over $1.8 million for this three-year effort," Solomon said.

"That amount of money may seem huge to a student living on peanut-butter sandwiches, but an external consulting firm has pegged it at approximately one-third of what our counterparts in the public and private sector are spending," he continued.

One way UCLA is keeping costs down is by integrating Y2K solutions into their normal maintenance and upgrading of systems.

"We are painting the car while it's running, so to speak," said David Motz, manager of Systems Programming for AIS.

AIS is responsible for the upkeep of 28 computer systems essential to the UCLA community, including University Records System Access (URSA), financial aid, admissions and student records. In addition, AIS monitors UCLA's fundraising and financial computer systems.

"Student systems hold top priority," Allen said.

"As a university, our main product is services to students, so those programs are targeted first."

So far, 79 percent of the AIS applications have been fixed.

The Associated Students of UCLA (ASUCLA) has taken a similar approach. Steve San Marchi, Chief Information Officer, said that computer systems will be replaced during normal maintenance and development activities.

"We are integrating it with our business plan as much as we can," Marchi said, explaining he is confident that such a strategy will solve ASUCLA's Y2K concerns within their normal development plan.

At the UCLA Medical Center, Dr. J. Michael McCoy, assistant dean for medical information systems, reports that in addition to fixing administrative systems, the Medical Center must also overhaul medical equipment like echographies (EKGs) and Computer-Aided Tomography (CAT) scans.

"We are tagging each piece of equipment we check with a Year 2000-compliant sticker so that we can keep track of everything," he said.

Y2K repairs will cost the Medical Center $3.8 million over three years.

McCoy's prognosis for the Medical Center's Y2K preparedness: "At worst, we may have a prolonged downtime for administrative systems, but we can temporarily work without them."

Patient care will not be affected.

"No one is going to die from this," he said.

UCLA library officials also say they are prepared.

"The old Orion would have been a problem, but it won't be with Orion2," said Suzanne Stinson, an administrative specialist in the university library. The library will be launching Orion2 soon, which is similar to the old Orion system, but is web-based.

The Office of Academic Computing, which runs UCLA's e-mail server Ben2 and the Computational Learning Instructional Computer Center (CLICC) Lab in Powell Library, is also preparing for Y2K. Marsha Smith of OAC said that the software which is currently running Ben2 and the hardware code are both Y2K-compliant."

According to Smith, the CLICC lab is also compliant.

OAC has also evaluated the computer systems at the various laboratories and departments on campus. The assessment revealed that much of UCLA's research community will escape calamity

"The vast majority of scientific simulators are time invariant, meaning they are independent of an exact starting point in time," Smith said.

However problems may arise for some researchers.

"Most of the potential problem we believe will arise from statistical data used in the social sciences, humanities, and medicine," Smith said.

For departments employing potentially vulnerable statistical data, OAC has set up a web site at http://www.oac.ucla.edu/rts/

statistics/y2k.htm, so departments undergoing repairs can find information on the bug.